Well as you can see, my Spidey-drawing days are pretty much over. Lately I've been working on stuff for my church, like designing a newsletter for our youth group and providing some of my artwork for an art section in the newsletter. I do have a few drawings that I still need to finish coloring, but I've been moving back and forth between writing and drawing that I haven't really had the time to get them all done, or to work on any new drawings.

I was, however, planning on doing a collaboration on something I was planning to donate to my church with a good friend of mine (she specializes in pastels and charcoal, while I am more comfortable with pencils and markers), but we've recently been having some personal issues with each other so that project has been put on hold, although I'm thinking that I'm pretty much going to have to do it all on my own. I was also working on a sketch of my friend but after several scheduling conflicts, along with our personal conflict, that project has also been placed on hold. I'll see if i can post a pic of how it was coming along though soon.

This is the drawing we were supposed to work on though, it's the one on the right:

Hey guys, sorry I haven't been around as much lately, but I've been really busy working on writing and art projects for school. But I figured I'd take some time now to update the thread and show you guys some of the stuff I've been working on. So here they are:

A perspective drawing I kept on updating for class. My professor is going to put it up on display:

Here's a couple of value drawings that my professor put on display

Here's an assignment we did in class. I really liked the way it turned out since I'm usually bad with charcoal:

Thanks, Sensi . And yeah, I'm beginning to like working with charcoal a whole lot more now since I know how to use it.

But anyways, sorry I haven't posted anything in a while, but I've been busy these past couple of months working on and writing and directing a short play and a few comedy skits for my church. But I'm on break for a few weeks, so i'll post some drawings from my class. I ended up getting an A and my professor hung up a few of my drawings, so here they are:

Here's a self-portrait i did for homework:

And here's the drawing I did for the final:

No even though I'm done with the class, I'm still trying to get in some more practice on what we learned, so here's a drawing I'm working on now:

Well here's some of my latest work. I've been learning how to use Adobe Illustrator and for my final assignment in my class, I had to re-draw an image from the web. Instead, I decided to use my own drawing and I think it came out a lot better than the original.

Well here's the final version .. for now. This is admittedly not my best work. I ran into many complications getting this one done, mainly because I was dealing with more of an image to cover, as opposed to doing just a head like my last three drawings. I was thinking about doing it on an 18x24 sheet as paper instead of a 9x11, but i wanted to test it out smaller first, but because of that, it was a lot harder to get into detail, mainly with the face which is what i was most concerned about. I might do another one of just the head, or try it again on bigger paper, but for the time being, here's how it came out.

And yeah I used to hate working with charcoal because i never knew how to use it, but after having a great art professor last year, I've become more confident in own my ability and the look of the drawing in general. It helps me give the drawing a more realistic look, although I do miss working with the pencil, especially since I love coloring with them.

Well, I finally finished my Welling drawing, here's the rest of the process:

Spidey,
I see a lot of improvement over the course of this thread. You've discovered perspective! My advice would be to continue to develop your skills with pencil, charcoal, etc before you go back to "inking" and coloring your work again. The main reason why people were saying that your pencil work was better, is because your inks were far to heavy and you weren't varying your line weights. In pencil, you are naturally doing this probably because a pencil can be more sensitive to pressure and angle than a marker can. When you've refined your illustration skills a bit more and start consciously manipulating your line work, you'll be ready to go back and revisit the inking. My advice there would be to invest in some cheaper pens/brushes of different sizes. You don't need to spend a ton of money, but you'll want to have some variety.
Continue to develop your observation skills. When you were working from pictures for Spidey early on, you were looking, not seeing. That is why you were losing the depth on your pictures and they were looking so flat. You were drawing shapes without regard to their actual spacial relationships. Now that you've had some training in perspective, I see a bit more depth in your work and it's not just because of the shading, you are starting to understand how to make your figures appear to exist in 3D space. Keep it up.
Keep working on your figures, especially the full body shots. You have some really good renderings, but you need to pay attention to proportions. The eyes should be half way down the head, the mouth half way between them and the chin and the bottom of the nose between the mouth and eyes, etc (textbook proportions, real humans vary a bit). Also, the body is so many heads tall, the shoulders so many heads wide, etc. This will also help you position your full-body shots so that they fit on the page better.

Sorry for the rant, but I see a lot of progress here and as a fellow artist, I get very excited to see younger artists learning these things and putting it all together. Keep up the good work, you're on your way. Also, continue to develop your spiritual/religious work. I can see that becoming something of a signature style/subject for you.

Thanks Kal-El Fan, I really appreciate the advice. It's nice to hear an outside point-of-view. And I agree, looking back at my older stuff, I see more mistakes now than I did years ago when I did them. I was using one of my Spidey drawings as a template for a Illustrator drawing, and I saw all of the perspective mistakes so clearly. It's funny now that I think about it because my art professor has been working with me outside of class to teach me two and three point perspective since he didn't have time to teach it to the class. And I think taking painting has also helped understand color and it's role in creating depth and shadow. And one of struggles has always been in drawing people, but luckily I'm taking Life Drawing this semester, so I'm very excited about studying the figure more. But thanks again for the advice, I really appreciate it.

Well anyways, here's the latest drawing that I've been working on:

This was supposed to be the final version but I think I'm going to go back and work on it some more: